Nano

CHAPTER 43

Pia stood in front of a large, almost ten-foot-high glass tank full of liquid. At her eye level, suspended upright in the liquid, was the body of a man, or, more accurately, two-thirds of the body of a man. He looked Chinese or Asian. The man’s brain was entirely exposed, and over his mouth was a tight-fitting mask, like a piece of scuba equipment. His eyes were open, staring blankly ahead. Pia could see that the chest had been opened and a portion of the wall cut away to expose the inflating and deflating lung. One of the man’s legs and one arm had been removed entirely, the stumps sealed tightly with a white material. On the remaining leg and arm, various muscles had been exposed, with electrodes inserted into particular muscle bundles.

The man was stationary, and to her horror, Pia could see what was holding him in place. He was anchored or impaled on a vertical pole that pierced his body in a cephalic-caudal axis, and also by various tubes that emanated from his body and disappeared into a number of sealed boxes on the floor. More lines ran from these boxes to the wall, where banks of signal lights were arranged in displays with a series of stopcocks. Pia looked at the lines more closely and could see that in one the red liquid was moving — it was bright red, oxygenated blood.

This half-man was alive, or mostly alive. And he was stuck on a spike like a butterfly collector’s specimen.

Pia staggered back until she leaned against the wall. She looked around the warm, humid room and saw it was cavernous, with a high black ceiling with exposed piping and duct work. The light coming from above was dim and seemed to be ultraviolet with a decidedly blue cast. Most of the light in the room came from the tank, which was brightly lit from above like a kind of huge aquarium. Pia noticed that there were more of these tanks, maybe as many as ten, but couldn’t see from where she was standing if they were all occupied. Most of them were.

There were people in the room, possibly lab workers or custodians, gowned with their faces covered with surgical masks. They stood about forty feet away, clustered around one of the aquarium-like tanks and were involved in a discussion. Pia couldn’t hear their voices amid the deep-throated hum and bubbling of powerful pumps that dominated the environment. There were three, no, four individuals: it was hard for Pia to tell. One looked over and spotted Pia. Pia made it a point to walk over to a nearby countertop, where there was a clipboard. She picked it up and pretended to study it.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…” Pia said to herself under her breath. What the hell was going on here? In her mind Berman’s comment only hours before kept replaying: “No one is being abused, trust me. Everything is totally voluntary.” Yeah, sure, thought Pia. “These half-dissected people volunteered to be human physiological experiments.” Pia’s mind went back to the poor dogs they had used in the lab in medical school. That was sickening enough, but this?

“Volunteers?” Pia whispered. “My ass!”

A tank with a woman inside was lined up facing the first one, so that the two victims could look at each other Pia thought morbidly. This female was submerged in liquid like the man in the first tank, and had obviously been partially dissected as well. Pia could also see a portion of her lungs expanding with each respiration. Pia shuddered. What she was seeing was far worse than her worst nightmare. These people were being kept in a semi-living state, artificially respired and monitored. But why?

The blood.

Pia looked at the tubes in each tank and saw blood leaving and entering both bodies. These individuals were being kept alive and their blood was being processed and analyzed. She looked more closely at the woman, and on her forearm, she saw tattooed numbers, much like the ones she had seen on the Chinese runner. She kicked herself for not following up on that lead at the time. For a moment she tried to imagine what the numbers meant, but instead her mind kept returning to the blood. If it was subject to so much attention in this room, Pia reasoned she should look at it herself. She now had a sneaking suspicion about what was going on, but she needed to prove it.

While pretending to look at the clipboard, Pia studied the room and the other workers. She could see they were wearing more protective clothing than she: full-barrier protection with gowns and booties as well as masks and hoods. Pia made sure she stood with a tank between her and the techs so that they couldn’t see she was wearing street shoes and no gown over her scrubs. The lines carrying blood to and from the bodies pierced the huge containers and had ports, so Pia knew that if she found a syringe, she could draw a sample.

Halfway across the room Pia saw an equipment unit with all sorts of material, including beakers and other glassware, as well as tubing and, she presumed, syringes. But to reach them, she would have to walk toward the other workers. There was no chance they wouldn’t see she wasn’t properly attired and that she was out of place there. In short there was no chance, in her mind, that she wasn’t going to be found out no matter what she did.

After Pia had left his house. Zach Berman had barely moved. He didn’t even untie himself immediately. He felt angry, humiliated, excited, unnerved, but mainly frustrated all at the same time. His anger came mostly from Pia’s leaving and from her brazen willfulness in taking those photos after he had specifically warned her not to. Yet he wasn’t truly worried that she had done it, after all, what could she possibly do with them? Pia seemed to think she had some ridiculous idea that having the photos would somehow work to her advantage. What was she going to do? Post a picture on a social media page? All it showed was him with his shirt off and a blindfold over his eyes. Big deal! It might be mildly embarrassing for a time, but most important it wouldn’t have any effect on the Chinese dignitaries he was dealing with. They all had mistresses, and they all played around. In that regard they were more like the French.

What Berman was mostly thinking was what a woman she was! What a tease! She had taken him to the edge of something, and he wanted to go back, desperately, and be thrown over. His phone pinged, telling him he had a text, but what could be so important at that time of night? Berman had a sudden thought. Maybe she’d somehow gotten his private mobile number, and it was Pia texting him, continuing the evening’s entertainment.

Quickly Berman extracted his hands from the slippery nylon rope, and pulled out his phone. Damn, it was from Whitney, reminding him of the calls he had to make that morning. How did she know he was still up? The woman needed to get a life, for God’s sake. Berman tossed the phone onto the couch so recently occupied by Pia’s delightful form. In his fantasy, she was coming back, and he slouched back in his chair and dreamed again about what he was going to do to her the next time he had an opportunity. She’d eluded him twice, first of his own accord and now of hers, but it wasn’t going to happen again. A tease was fun, but there was a limit.

Abruptly, two of the lab technicians left the room, walking out through a second entrance on their side that Pia hadn’t noticed before. The other two were preoccupied, apparently attending to a problem at the side of the aquarium structure, where they had been grouped. Quickly Pia took advantage of the situation and strode over to where the medical equipment was kept. She saw all manner of laboratory and medical paraphernalia, but where were the syringes? She opened a few drawers and found them. She grabbed three and went back to the first tank, nearest to the double doors through which she had entered the room.

A quick perusal of the port and Pia figured out where to attach the syringes. She plugged one into the line, toggled the stopcock, and drew a full syringe of blood, capped it, and quickly took two more. Hazarding a glance into the depths of the room, she noticed that a third tech had left. The remaining individual was still engrossed in whatever he or she was doing, so Pia pulled out her iPhone from her pocket, opened the camera app, switched off the flash, and quickly took a picture without raising the phone above the level of her hip.

Then Pia walked out of the room without looking back. Had she been seen? There must be cameras in there, she thought, but perhaps she didn’t look suspicious. Still, if anyone compared the entry logs with her appearance, she didn’t look much like Zachary Berman. She was afraid she didn’t have a lot of time. As Pia walked, she tried to process exactly what she had just seen. They were living, human laboratory experiments, somehow being kept alive, their circulatory systems being run through banks of testing equipment. Pia stopped for a second and thought she was going to throw up. What Nano was doing was such a travesty of ethics that it was unspeakable. But she didn’t have time to let herself become emotional. She gathered herself quickly. She had work to do.

As she retraced her steps back to her lab, Pia couldn’t help but think of the Chinese runner she had helped take to the ER. Was that him back in that chamber of horror? If not him, it was someone like him, a tattooed person maintained in a fish tank for physiological experimentation. Berman had said there were things going on at Nano that were taking place at facilities like it all over the world. Did he mean that? What she had just seen? Again, she felt a momentary wave of nausea sweep over her, making her shudder.

When she reached the lab, Pia thought about calling the police right away, but she was still ruled by her significant distrust of authority. She was trespassing, and it would be easy for Nano security to prove she had faked her way in using fabricated ID. The authorities would get nowhere near that lab tonight, and Nano probably had some major contingency plan for emergencies. Maybe they could dismantle the whole setup or exchange the human bodies for some other animals if necessary. The more information Pia had, the better.

Pia needed to look at the blood. Her work at Nano had involved microbivores, but she knew Nano could easily have been making other nanorobots with the same nanomolecular manufacturing techniques the company had perfected. Having seen the bodies in the tanks, Pia wondered what else Nano might be making. Perhaps these were nightmarish versions of tests that normally would have been conducted on lab animals, but in their race to bring to market, maybe they were just skipping animal testing for reasons of expediency and going directly to humans.

Back in her lab, Pia subjected some of the blood to a gentle, selective centrifugation, utilizing a special kind of apheresis to separate the blood solids from the plasma and then the solids themselves. Pia knew the nanorobots could be converted to neutral buoyancy by ultrasound waves, which she had used on the sample prior to putting it in the centrifuge.

With the gentle centrifugation under way, Pia turned on the scanning electron microscope to allow it to boot up. With that accomplished, and the remaining blood hidden in one of the many refrigerators in the lab, Pia peeled off her scrub clothes. She had another thought. She had to test the Chinese jogger’s blood that Paul still had squirreled away. It made her task that much more hazardous in that it would require leaving Nano and returning, but Pia knew she had to do it. Whatever she might find in the blood of the dissected individual in the tank, she needed to know if it was in the jogger, too.

Leaving the lights on in the lab, Pia went back to the elevators and descended to the lower level. As calmly as possible, she exited through the glass partition and walked back across the lobby toward the main exit. Russ was still on duty, reading a newspaper at the empty reception desk.

“You done for the night, miss?”

“No, Russ. I’m coming right back.”